Having caught up with the final two episodes of Mad Men's first season over the weekend, here are some unsorted thoughts on the season as a whole. (Spoilers ahead for those planning to catch up with Mad Men on DVD; and since I'll be referring to characters by their first name without really explaining who they are, probably only those who've watched the show need read any further.)…
-I know some people have never been able to get past the shtickiness of Mad Men's "Hey look, it's 1960!" approach–that "see how they smoke!" "see how they drink!" "see how they wear suits and ties and pretty frocks!" wink-and-nudge that mostly peaked in episode one–but the gimmick is part of the show's overarching theme. The liquor in every glass and the smoke in every room seep through these characters' finery like a poison. And as the brandishing of the surgeon general's report in the first episode indicates, none of these people can claim to be innocent of what their vices are doing to them. Roger's heart attack at midseason is just one of many examples during the season of chickens coming home to roost.
-How perfect was it that Pete learns Don's big secret–part of it anyway–by receiving a package not meant for him? In a show that's largely about people who aren't who they say they are, Pete can only catch a break when someone from the mail room mistakes him for Don.
–Mad Men's first season had a few slightly off episodes–like "Red In The Face," where Don emasculates Roger by causing him to vomit on a potential client, and "Shoot," where Pete gets into a fight over Peggy and Don prevents Betty from resuming her modeling career–but there aren't that many shows like Mad Men where I can read an episode title and feel an instant chill. For example, "5G," with the title referring to a dollar amount and an apartment number; and "The Hobo Code," where we learn the symbol that tells a drifter "a dishonest man lives here." And does any episode title describe Mad Men as well as "Nixon Vs. Kennedy?" (Which reminds me of another fine use of plot-as-theme: The whole Sterling-Cooper staff parties through the 1960 presedential election night, then wakes up with a hangover that should last, oh, the next 20 years or so.)
-I agree with some of Mad Men's detractors that the show can a little on-the-nose about some subjects. Gender in particular. I've no doubt that men in Manhattan offices in 1960 treated women like objects, maybe even to the point of tackling a secretary during a party and asking, "What color panties are you wearing?" But the gender politics of Mad Men conform so much to the stereotypes of the era that it's hard to trust them as "true." So don't. The show works either way. To get caught up in whether Mad Men is "accurate" about its period is to fixate on a virtual irrelevancy. In a broad sense, Mad Men has a lot to say about a changing America in the mid-20th century, and it has a lot of keen period detail, too. But it's more about illusions, compromises and second chances–all timeless concepts, explored as much through metaphor as through specific socio-historical incident. Rather than groaning at the revelation in the finale that Peggy is pregnant–seemingly a clunky way to set up the career-versus-family divide that nearly derailed feminism before it really got started–think of this development as symbolic. The season opens with Peggy at the gynecologist, getting a birth control prescription, and it ends with her delivering a baby. In every sense, she's becoming what she may never have meant to be.
-On-the-nose or not, Christina Hendricks' performance as imperious office slut Joan was never less than a marvel, especially towards the end of the season, when the extent of her melancholy affair with Roger was revealed.
-Having recently watched Ken Burns' The War and read David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter, I can't help but think that Don Draper/Dick Whitman's Korean War service isn't just a plot point but a character-definer. Don/Dick would've been one of those boys who joined up expecting to be a part of the world-beating, can-do U.S. Army of World War II, only to find an under-manned, under-equipped, ineffectively bureaucrat-icized military. The goods he bought were not what he'd been sold.
-More media synchronicity: I recently watched a documentary about influential art collector Sam Wagstaff, who worked on Madison Avenue in the '50s. At the time, people with an artistic bent who came from a family of means used advertising jobs a way to satisfy their parents' nagging that they needed to make a respectable living. But it was a "settling" move. No wonder so many of the staffers at Sterling-Cooper have a novel or a play gathering dust in their desk drawers.